Quote:
Originally Posted by Aalderon Crystafire
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Beautifully done, Todd. I also love to collect and play with retro PCs. I have the same Dell, which belonged to my cousin and was originally a Pentium II 300mhz. My own first PC, an XPS R450 that our family bought at the end of 1998 has a slightly different case design and came equipped with a Aureal Vortex 1 (Turtle Beach Montego), the rather new nVidia RIVA TNT as well as the fastest CPU at the time, a Pentium II @ whopping 450mhz.
Despite that, Dell shipped these with pretty barebone drivers and having no concept of what a GPU driver even was I thought our video card was trash when it could only run Half-Life in software rendering. We got a Diamond Monster 3D II (Voodoo 2) that XMas and installed it -- I was playing Everquest the following June in Glide @ 800x600. I've since rebuilt this machine, maybe I'll take some pictures some time.
I also have ...
-Diamond Monster Voodoo 1
-Voodoo 3 2000 AGP
-Voodoo 3 3000 an AGP as well as PCI with the original box with Everquest screenshots on the back!
-Voodoo 5 PCI with the box.
For CRTs I have a brand new old stock 17" Philips 107E monitor -- one of the shortest depth CRTs ever made but it caps out at 1024x768 or 1280x1024 for 5:4 aspect ratio. I also have a 22" behemoth Diamondtron Mitsubishi Pro that goes up to 2048 x 1536 at 86 Hz and still has better colors than any LED/LCD I've owned.
My collection also includes two Tandy 1000s, a socket 7 Pentium MMX, a flex slot-1 rig that can do 286 to Pentium III speeds and rocks two sound cards -- a SB Pro 2.0 for OPL3 and an AWE64 Gold which feeds my Roland Sound Canvas!
Finally, I have an OP Windows 98 rig running a S939 AMD 4000+ , a Aureal Vortex 2 A3D and an FX5900 Ultra. My current daily driver is a Ivy-E Bridge CPU and the fastest Kepler based card so in addition to Windows 7 it has the fastest officially supported Windows XP hardware -- Titanium X-Fi for that EAX as well.
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Awesome!! Thanks for sharing. Amazing collection. I'd love to lay eyes on a 22" 2048 x 1536 CRT. The color of my Trinitron has it's moments, but it has an over-bright issue that is common on these models apparently.
Very cool video card collection, especially the Voodoo3 box with EQ screenshots! I have my original Voodoo3 2000 PCI box that my dad bought for us back in the day. No longer have the card though, unfortunately.
I too had this Dell model with a Pentium II as my first Windows PC experience. My father bought it when I would of been I guess 9 or 10. Before that, I grew up playing on our Amiga 2000, which I still have but unfortunately not with me at the moment. I moved cross country a few years ago and couldn't take it with me at the time, so it is waiting patiently for me to retrieve it and return it to it's full glory.
OH and I'm super jealous of your Roland Sound Canvas! Getting a proper midi setup is a dream of mine. What are your favorite games to play with it? Is there a midi version of the EQ theme song!?!?